this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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No, it's authoritarianism vs democracy. It's a very well-known concept in political science that authoritarian regimes can make decisions and execute on them far faster than democracies. The problem is that autocratic decision making ultimately creates instability by implementing policies and decisions that don't have a broad base of stakeholder support. Why should any citizen support a decision that was made without their input or consent?
It's also a reflection of how much power money still holds even in the US's democratic system. The decision to not build high speed rail in California was heavily influenced by a single billionaire, it wasn't voted on.
America isn't a democracy. It's a democracy of the rich and always has been, the rest us were begrudgingly allowed a vote over centuries but our influence is still very limited
A plutocracy, you might say.
And yet the Titans of Industry tended to support Clinton over Trump: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/10/25/donald-trump-a-billionaire-shunned-by-the-very-rich
In this case I would have preferred the outcome of the billionaire-backed candidate winning.
Do you understand how the Chinese political system works? I'd recommend that you learn a bit more about it from the Chinese perspective because Western generalizations of it miss a lot of details.
I'd recommend that you start from the bottom (how people can join the party and take office, how rural collectives work, how protests influence local policy) and make your way up to the municipal, provincial, and national level.
You'll see how each level has checks and balances to make sure that they make good decisions, and you'll see how the incentive structure rewards "good" decisions. You'll also see where a lot of the corruption comes from (in rural collectives) and why efforts to fix that haven't worked as well as they could.
So same as the US democracy then. All that matters is money and nothing else. Musk did the Hyperloop bullshit just so it would delay the train and people would be more Tesla's.
What a fancy way to avoid acknowledging the hard truth. Western democracies have failed their "stakeholders" by shunning rail in favour of car centric infrastructure. In doing so they have benefited the auto and oil industries at the expense of the health, safety, and quality of life of everyone.
North America's lack of high speed rail is an absolute embarrassment.
That shows your misunderstanding of who the Western governments think the stakeholders really are. It's the auto and oil industries. The governments are serving them just fine
China has also built tons of car infrastructure. Gone are the days where millions of Chinese rode bicycles, dominating the streets. Now, millions of bicycles are second to the mighty Chinese car.